Quotes by
Cecil Beaton

His cherubic, almost simpleton, appearance is most disconcerting—for it gives no indication of the far from simple character of this somewhat twisted artist of the secret, prying lens.

Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.

I want to make photographs of very elegant women taking the lipstick off their teeth.

[He stared into the camera] like some sort of an animal gazing from across the back of its sty.

Cocteau says I am Malice in Wonderland and I have succeeded in spending my life in an unreality made up of fun, so much too much fun and my interests are limited to the joys of certain superficial forms of beauty.

You can’t teach people photography, they’ve got to learn how to do it the best way possible for them. They can learn from looking at pictures... but they don’t really get intimate with the medium until they’ve made a few bad shots.

Mrs Woolf’s complaint should be addressed to her creator, who made her, rather than me.